


Not Death (But Her Sister, Sleep)

by lesbiankavinsky



Series: Lady TRC [3]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, F/M, Other, basically everyone has a crush on everyone and it's messy and they're working it out, oh my god tagging this for relationships is a nightmare, this is way less canon compliant than raven girls
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-07-14 22:40:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 18,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7193813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbiankavinsky/pseuds/lesbiankavinsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A gayer spin on The Dream Thieves (but ladies)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The keys are unbelievably real in her hand. Realer than day-to-day, like a oversaturated photograph. She pulls them from the ignition, and she wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for alcohol dependence (this is basically a standing warning for this installment of Lady TRC, there's gonna be lots of it)

It’s summer. For weeks after the end of school, Ronan wakes up with that thought in her head. Ronan has always hated the heat, but she loves summer in spite of it because it’s the season of cars and nights spent on the roof with Gansey and freedom, three whole months without school and without homework, no uniforms, no irate messages from Declan, no classes missed. She isn’t happy, but she’s close enough to taste it. Everything is more vivid in the summer, and though the Virginia heat is hellish, it does make things more real. She falls asleep in a tank top and boxers, a frozen water bottle pressed between her thighs. All the same, she wakes up with her back slicked with sweat.

She wakes up.

There is something in her hand. She remembers how it got there. 

 

She’s dreaming, and she’s in the forest as she always is, but she’s also in a parking lot, and the two things exist together, the asphalt broken around the trunks of the trees, moss growing on the curb. The most consistent thing about Ronan’s dreams is their impracticality, the fact that if Gansey could step into them she’d be profoundly disturbed, not by the horrors they contain but by their lack of logic. 

At the far end of the parking lot there’s a car, familiar as her own skin, obnoxiously bright against the somber earth tones of the forest. She walks towards it. This is Gansey’s illogic, her insistence on using a car that breaks down constantly, a beautiful vintage shitbox. But it makes sense to Gansey, so it makes sense to Ronan. She can’t love this car the way Gansey loves it, but she does love it the way  _ she  _ loves  _ Gansey _ . That is, with a terrible and constant longing, with greed and jealousy. She wants it, not because it’s a great car, but for the sake of having it. 

When she reaches the Camaro, she puts her hand on it and closes her eyes. Ronan knows this is a dream. She can’t feel the metal beneath her hand, not really. It’s perfectly imaginary, but she doesn’t mind because when she opens her eyes again it’s still there, hasn’t shifted into something else while she wasn’t paying attention. She opens the door and sits in the driver’s seat, and this of course is a dream because it can never, ever happen. Then she remembers that she came here for something, there was something that she’d fallen asleep wanting to take out. For a moment she can’t remember, but then her hand goes automatically to where the keys sit in the ignition. She puts her hand around them, and she can feel them. Her heart skips with excitement. If she isn’t careful, she’ll wake up too soon. She remembers a hundred times that Gansey has snatched these keys out of her reach, a hundred times she’s watched them dangle, the ring around Gansey’s middle finger as she bats them back and forth with pinky and thumb. She remembers. 

The keys are unbelievably  _ real  _ in her hand. Realer than day-to-day, like a oversaturated photograph. She pulls them from the ignition, and she wakes up.

 

She wakes up. 

 

It’s agony, waiting for her muscles to unlock -- not because it’s painful but because she wants so desperately to open her clenched fist and look to see if the keys are really there. She can feel them, but she doesn’t trust any one sense on its own. Besides, it’s possible that something entirely different than what she meant to pull from her dream will be in her hand. It’s happened before, plenty of times. Finally, her fingers and toes begin to uncurl and eventually she can sit up, still a little stiff, and look at the object. It’s the Camaro keys, a perfect replica of the set in Gansey’s desk drawer. She can’t know for sure that they’ll actually work -- things work in real life if they work in the dream, but the problem here is that they’d worked in her dream Camaro, not independently, so she’ll have to find an opportunity to test them. The idea of driving the Camaro, of even putting the keys into the ignition, is so simultaneously thrilling and horrifying that she gets out of bed, movements jerky, and puts the keys into her sock drawer before getting back into bed and pulling the sheet over herself. She checks her phone. It’s not yet six in the morning, but she doubts she’ll be able to fall asleep again. She can’t quite regret it, because she could only have pulled the keys out at that exact moment, and even if she isn’t yet sure how or when she’ll use them, she wouldn’t give them up for anything. 

Chainsaw pecks at her back. She isn’t sure when he came to the bed, but she rolls over and strokes his head. He’s growing more quickly than she’d expected, but despite extensive research, she hasn’t been able to determine whether this is natural or the product of his dream origin. Lifting him to her shoulder, she goes out into the main room to see if Gansey is up. 

Aside from Gansey’s insomnia, Ronan knows her to be a creature of habit and her time on the rowing team obliged her to be up before five every morning, so it isn’t really surprising that she’s sitting in bed reading with her wire-rim glasses on at a quarter to six. She looks up when she hears footsteps and puts her glasses on top of her head.

“You’re up early,” she says as Ronan climbs gracelessly onto the mattress and folds her long legs to sit. 

“I was dreaming.”

“Oh?” Gansey says, settling her book on her lap. 

“I thought you weren’t supposed to leave books cracked open like that. Thought it was bad for the spine or whatever.”

Gansey shrugs. “It’ll look loved.” 

Ronan snorts and Gansey gives her a pointed look that says she hasn’t forgotten her curiosity over Ronan’s dream. Ever since she’d told them all about Chainsaw, Gansey has been fascinated with Ronan’s special power. The others are interested too, but not obsessively. When Gansey decides to be interested, she never seems quite able to restrain herself, though.

“It was the parking lot outside Monmouth, but it was also Cabeswater.”

“How?” Gansey asks, idly running a finger along the spine of her book like she’s petting a cat.

“Christ, I don’t know, that’s just how it was. There were trees in the parking lot.”

Predictably, Gansey says, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“You know what’s funny,” Ronan replies, “is that I actually thought about the fact that you’d say that while I was in my dream.”

Gansey grins. “Really?”  
“Yeah. I knew it was a dream, and I thought, Gansey would think this place was stupid because there are trees in a parking lot.”  
“You know me too well,” Gansey says. 

“Damn straight.” 

For a while they sit, and Ronan is grateful that Gansey doesn’t ask any more questions. She doesn’t want to tell her about the keys, but she doesn’t want to lie either.

“You said it was difficult,” Gansey says after a while. “That you can’t take anything too big.” She hesitates a moment, like she’s asking an incredibly personal question. “If you could take anything out of your dreams, what would it be? If it wasn’t difficult?”

Ronan answers without thinking. “A car, man. The most beautiful car in the world.”

Gansey laughs. “You already have the most beautiful car in the world.”

“No, you do.”

They sit together quietly, Ronan running her finger over Chainsaw’s head, and she wonders what they’re really talking about. Gansey has always said that she’s unbelievably literal, and ever since then Ronan is constantly wondering what subtext she’s missing. 

Finally Gansey says, “What do you think of Blue?”

Ronan shrugs. “He’s alright.”

Gansey snorts. “I think that’s a much more generous answer than you would have given a few weeks ago.”

“Maybe so,” Ronan replies. “Why?”  
“I like him,” Gansey says, and there’s something awfully serious in her voice. “And I don’t think I’m supposed to. Don’t tell Eve.”

“Oh man,” Ronan says, feeling a little crushed and aware that she’s channeling her anger in a not entirely honest direction. “Don’t ask me to lie for you.”

“You don’t have to lie. Just don’t mention it to her. I don’t think she’d have any reason to ask.”

“Are you fucking in love with him?”

Gansey shakes her head, a little too quickly. Then she says, “I think I will be one day.”

“So you’re falling in love with him?”

Gansey shakes her head again, contemplative. “It’s not quite that. It’s more like -- it’s like I know that I’m going to. Like a premonition. Like it’s happened before.”

“I don’t buy into that deja vu bullshit,” Ronan says, and Gansey just smiles, that serene smile that makes Ronan want to hit things. “Whatever. I won’t tell Eve.”

“You’re jealous,” Gansey says, and it’s a statement, not a question. Ronan hates that she doesn’t even have to ask. She looks down, and then feels Gansey’s hand settle on her knee. “You know I’ll always love you, right? Always.”

“You can’t love me the same way you love him. Or are going to love him.”

Gansey juts her lower jaw forward, one of the few and rare outward signs of her temper, like _just you watch me._ “If I don’t love you the way you want me to, it won’t be because of Blue.”  
Ronan holds her breath. It’s such a strange moment that she can’t quite believe it’s real. They always skirt around this, the way you scratch just around a mosquito bite and not over it directly. How you press at the edges of a bruise or a wound. This is the closest either of them has ever come to the actual question. Ronan can almost hear it in the air between them. _How do you want me to love you, Ronan_. She doesn’t have an answer. Or rather, she does and she doesn’t want to say it, and she doesn’t want to lie. She doesn’t want to lie about anything, but especially not about this. In the end, she’s pretty sure that’s why Gansey never asks. Maybe that’s how she’d lost her chance. Maybe she’d never had a chance. She doesn’t like to think about it.

“Let’s go to the grocery store,” Ronan says. “I want orange juice.”

Gansey rolls her eyes. “You want beer.”

“Whatever. I want to get out of the apartment.”

“Okay,” Gansey says. Unless Ronan is asking for something that will hurt, Gansey almost never says no to her. “Let’s go.”

Ronan goes back to her room and pulls on a pair of torn up jeans and a thin zip-up hoodie and and returns to the main room to find that Gansey has changed out of her pajamas and into a little slip of a dress that makes Ronan badly want to touch her shoulders. She stuffs her hands into her pockets and follows Gansey down the stairs to the Pig, damp with dew. Ronan makes her usually swipe at the keys (a little redundant now, she realizes, but so habitual that she does it anyway) before making her way to the passenger side. Gansey runs the windshield wipers for a moment before pulling out of the parking lot. At six in the morning it’s already warm enough that they can comfortably roll down the windows. It’s going to be a blisteringly hot day. Ronan puts her hand out to grip the hood of the car and wishes they were going fast enough to justify it. She wishes she’d gotten more sleep. She wishes she could kiss Gansey. When she gets back, she’s going to mix a glass of orange juice and gin and start the day buzzed. She’d woken up so very nearly happy. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lady TDT is posting! Woohoo! This may not keep up quite as regular a schedule as Raven Girls did because I'm at a really intense summer school, but I will do my best.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan is slumped in the passenger’s seat, sullen and hazy from the heat, but she sits up when she spots a familiar streak of white gaining on them rapidly in the rearview mirror. There’s only one person with a car like that in Henrietta, but Ronan’s heart still beats harder when she sees Josey Kavinsky’s unmistakable hand with its dozen rings visible over the hood of the car, flipping them off.

As long as Ronan has known her, Gansey has been keen on the idea of experimentation. She likes putting ideas into practice, seeing results, testing abilities and limitations. While there can be no real argument against Gansey’s field being history, she has, in many ways, the mind of a scientist. She likes logic and one of her great joys in life is poking at the edges of what’s possible. It’s not the way Ronan’s mind works, but it’s part of what makes Gansey so attractive to her. So it’s not really surprising when, the first time in that strange summer that Ronan dreams up an object, Gansey wants to run tests on it, and Ronan agrees. Maybe it’s because she’s so used to the idea that almost everything she owns is replaceable, but Ronan has never put too high a value on her possessions. 

They ride out in the Pig, early in the morning to avoid the blistering afternoon heat, Gansey driving as always and Ronan in the passenger seat with her head against the window frame, letting the wind hit her full in the face, Chainsaw on her shoulder and her little dream plane in her lap. Blue, Eve, and Leah are squeezed into the backseat. It might actually be a decent deal for once, considering that the AC is out of commission as it so often is and Leah is the main source of cold in the cramped car.  Ronan thinks it would make most sense for her to be in the middle, so they can all take advantage of her deathly chill, but she’s on Ronan’s side of the car. Ronan knows why, of course. She may not notice everything, but she hasn’t missed the way Blue and Eve are always as close as they justifiably can be. She only glances back once to see that their thighs, both bared by matching denim shorts, are pressed together from hip to knee. Since the tone of her skin is only a bare shade lighter than Blue’s, it’s easy to imagine herself there in his place. She doesn’t. She won’t. Instead, she turns her attention to the world outside which is green almost beyond belief. It quickens her blood, she thinks. A Ganseyish phrase, and one she would sneer at coming from anyone else. Strange that it should end up in her own head. But Gansey has that effect on her. 

They’re driving not to Cabeswater as they usually do but to a hill, a favorite spot of Gansey’s, where they won’t be disturbed. Ronan slams the car door behind her and squints at the surrounding countryside. She’s lived in this area her entire life but somehow it’s Gansey, a relative newcomer, who knows the landscape by heart. Not so surprising, really, when she stops to consider that her own geography is restricted to her family’s plot of land. 

Gansey comes around the hood to stand next to her, putting on a pair of movie star sunglasses, dark and round and expensive. Blue is eying them with disgust, but undeniably they suit Gansey. 

“Well,” Gansey says. “What are we waiting for?” She begins to lead the way up the hill, her stride energetic. Ronan follows with less good humor but willingly enough, as she follows Gansey everywhere, and Leah tails after. When Ronan looks back she sees Eve and Blue lagging behind and talking, Blue carrying the telescope that Gansey had insisted on bringing. (“You own a  _ telescope? _ ” Blue had asked, attempting without complete success to mask his envy with irritation.) Eve catches Ronan’s glance and, hitching her shoulders up a little in a habitual gesture of discomfort, increases her pace to catch up to the other girls. 

The four of them reach the top of the hill long before Blue, and Gansey leaves them to help with the telescope after rewarding Ronan with a punch in the arm for her muttered comment, “How chivalrous.” Eve and Leah stand on either side of Ronan to look down at the dream plane. They’ve all seen her dream objects before, of course. Much of what clutters her little room is from her mind -- all her favorite shirts, shorts in men’s styles that would never fit around her hips if she bought them in a store, knick-knacks and exercise equipment, Chainsaw’s perch and, of course, Chainsaw himself. But until recently, Ronan’s friends have never looked at any of those things with any attention. Most of them look ordinary enough, even if they all have the undeniable marks of being somehow unreal if examined closely enough. Now the attention being paid to this little plastic toy makes Ronan feel bared to the world. It’s uncomfortable, and her instinct is to tuck the toy against her chest and hide it from view. But that would show that she’s bothered by the way they’re looking at it, so she ignores the instinct. 

When Gansey and Blue finally arrive at the top of the hill, Leah and Eve back up to make room for the other two in their circle. Eve reaches out and turns over the plane in Ronan’s hand, and Ronan makes an effort not to flinch. It’s just a toy. She doesn’t know why she’s feeling so prickly about it. It’s not as though it’s really  _ her _ . 

Seeing the hatch on the belly of the plane, Eve says, “Open it up.” She says it with a touch of skepticism, as though expecting to see  _ Made in China  _ inscribed on the inside.

“Doubting Thomas,” Ronan replies, but she opens it to reveal the hollow inside.

“Well, it’s impossible then,” Eve says, tone final. “It won’t fly if it has no battery and no engine.”

This annoys Ronan, not simply because Eve doubts her abilities but because Eve thinks she understands the rules here. Eve knows nothing about dream logic and dream laws. This is Ronan’s territory, and she doesn’t like having her expertise questioned and so she repeats Eve’s words, exaggerating the accent so hated by Eve and so loved by Ronan. Then, “Leah: the controller.”

Leah, whose only job had been to carry the controller up the hill, had managed at some point to drop it in the grass and now she pokes around with her toe until she finds it and dutifully hands it over.

“What’s supposed to go inside the plane, if not a battery?” Gansey asks, peering into the plane, the familiar scientific spark in her eye. 

Ronan shrugs. “I don’t know. In the dream it was little missiles, but I guess they didn’t come with.” The magic of dreams is so familiar to her, so ordinary that their curiosity feels odd, like someone asking why you put shoes on your feet and a hat on your head. Rationally she knows that this shouldn’t grate on her nerves, so she tries not to be annoyed, or at least not to seem so. 

Blue reaches down to grab at the grass around their ankles, which is going to seed. “Here,” he says, dropping some of the seeds into the empty hatch.

“Good thinking, maggot,” Ronan says. 

Eve takes the controller from Leah’s hand, and Ronan feels another stab of irritation or insecurity.

“This doesn’t even weigh anything,” she says, and passes it on to Blue, who holds it for a moment before giving it to Ronan. 

“It will work. It worked in the dream, so it’ll work now.” She gives the plane to Leah, because she’s the only one who hasn’t managed to piss Ronan off today. “Hold it up.”

From her shoulder, Chainsaw says, “ _ Kerah. _ ”

“Yes,” Ronan says to Chainsaw, because he likes it when people respond to him. “Count it down.”

They count down in unison and Ronan hits the button to make the plane take off, and it soars from the palm of Leah’s hand into the sky. 

It’s only when the plane is airborne that Ronan realizes that none of them except perhaps Leah had actually believed it would work. Gansey’s laugh is as shocked as it is delighted, and Eve and Blue’s matching gasps make it clear that they’d had no real faith.  _ The evidence of things not seen,  _ Ronan thinks. They’d all needed proof. Ronan has never really wanted proof of anything, and yet it keeps being dropped in her lap. She thinks of the devil, and her head twitches a little involuntarily. It’s an awful thing to be deprived of the opportunity for faith. Ronan doesn’t want to think about that. Instead she follows the plane with her eyes, turning it this way and that with the controller, especially when Chainsaw takes off to chase it. Flying it back over their heads, Ronan hits the button that controls the hatch and the seeds Blue had offered tumble down on them.

“You incredible creature,” Gansey says, putting her sunglasses on top of her head, and Ronan’s entire body goes light. Knocking shoulders with Ronan, she says, “Glyndower traveled with magi, did you know? Magicians, I mean. Wizards. They helped her control the weather -- maybe you could dream us a cold snap.”

“Har,” Ronan says, rolling her eyes, though there’s something appealing about having a place in the Gansey-as-Glyndower analogy that exists tacitly among them.

“They also told the future,” she says with a glance at Blue.

He only looks cross and says, “Don’t look at me.”

“Or helped her tell the future. Shall we go?” She says, when Ronan lands the plane back in Leah’s slightly twitching hand. 

The plane is, in fact, only the beginning of their outing. Gansey had been planning a day of exploration and was pleased to add an experiment to the schedule when Ronan had turned up in the morning with the plane. The plan is to walk along the leyline, using the telescope to get a sense of its path until it gets too hot. In the end, the plane is the main event since they find absolutely nothing on their walk and end up at a the edge of a lake. This does nothing to discourage Gansey, who considers every mile of the leyline covered to be an accomplishment, something she can write about in her notebook. Ronan isn’t bothered because she can’t stop thinking about the plane and the way the others watched it, amazed and delighted. Besides, she doesn’t have anything better to be doing, a statement which is never true of Eve and rarely true of Blue, so it’s unsurprising that they seem weary by the time the four of them get back to the Camaro. 

But none of them have to talk on the drive back because much of it is taken up by Gansey’s phone conversation with the ancient British professor, Mallory Roger, to whom Gansey refers alternately as  _ colleague, mentor,  _ and _ friend _ and to whom Ronan habitually refers as  _ that English weirdo.  _ During this conversation, Gansey ignores Ronan’s repeated complaints about the speed at which their driving and the brokenness of the AC. She is overheated and overexcited and restless. What she wants more than anything is to jump into a cold pool and hang their, suspended in the silent water. She closes her eyes and thinks of this until Gansey hangs up the phone and then turns. 

“We have to find a way to look under it,” Gansey says, referring to the lake.

This, as Ronan could have predicted, sparks an argument with Eve, and Ronan’s attention turns back out the window. Still, she can’t take her mind entirely off the conversation, because though none of them are saying it, it’s really about Cabeswater, and Ronan can’t really help caring about Cabeswater. It’s summer and school’s out and Ronan doesn’t want to be pissed at her friends, but it’s hard to avoid now, when Eve is talking about the difficulty of traveling a leyline which she woke with some kind of magical sacrifice, and Gansey is very carefully avoiding saying that the leyline would be safer if it weren’t for Eve doing something so reckless. Ronan knows she isn’t just pissed because of the dishonesty of it, but also because Eve was never been in trouble with Gansey over the Whelk debacle, and Ronan, whose sins are many but, in the grand scheme of things, quite innocuous, is never out of trouble. It’s unjust, and it needles at her, and so she’s a little nastier than she has to be to Gansey when she complains of getting roped into helping out at another Washington fundraiser. 

Ronan is slumped in the passenger’s seat, sullen and hazy from the heat, but she sits up when she spots a familiar streak of white gaining on them rapidly in the rearview mirror. There’s only one person with a car like that in Henrietta, but Ronan’s heart still beats harder when she sees Josey Kavinsky’s unmistakable hand with its dozen rings visible over the hood of the car, flipping them off. 

“Oh Christ, is that Kavinsky?” Gansey asks, clear by her tone that she both knows it is and wishes it wasn’t. 

“I hate that prick,” Eve says. She sounds exhausted.

In general, Eve has a kinder outlook on the world than Ronan. It’s a pretty low bar, actually, and Eve doesn’t clear it by that much, but she does clear it in the end. In general, Ronan hates everyone Eve hates, and plenty of other people besides. But there’s nothing  _ in general  _ about Kavinsky, and for a moment Ronan considers what exactly it is she feels for Josey, carefully biting at the leather straps around her wrist. 

The Mitsubishi pulls up next to the Camaro and the window rolls down and Ronan abruptly stops considering how she feels about Kavinsky. Kavinsky is leaning over the wheel in a tight white tank top, wrists glittering with bracelets, her short, dark hair scraped back into a ponytail. Ronan can see where the strands too short to be pulled back stick to her neck with sweat. She adjusts her white sunglasses and blows a pink bubble with her gum. It pops and with her tongue she pulls it back into her mouth before swearing cordially at Gansey. Prokopenko, her impossibly pastel pink hair knotted into two little buns on top of her head and liberally sprinkled with glitter, giggles in the passenger seat. 

“Do it,” Ronan says, drumming her fingers against the dashboard as she leans forward, her heart drumming with the expectation of adrenaline. 

“I know you are not referring to street racing,” Gansey says, infuriatingly composed.

“Come on, man,” Ronan says. She can practically feel the rush of acceleration, but Gansey remains steady at two miles above the speed limit. She knows Gansey loves this car, but really it’s a crime to give a Camaro to someone who drives like this. Eve starts saying that they could never beat Kavinsky with a full car and an ancient engine. This infuriates Ronan because first of all it  _ doesn’t matter _ , it’s more about the chance to race than the chance to win, but secondly and more importantly because the Camaro, even weighed down by four people and a ghost, even in its shitty state, could beat the Mitsu because Kavinsky has always relied on her beautiful, fast car and can’t drive for shit. 

“It’s irrelevant. It’s not happening. Kavinsky’s a dirtbag,” Gansey says, cutting of their argument just as Kavinsky drives away.

Blue finally sees the driver and says, “Her! She’s not a dirtbag, she’s an asshole.”

Ronan watches with longing and fury as the white Mitsubishi swings around the corner, tires squealing. She drops back in her seat, her mood officially ruined. 

“You see, Tom concurs.”

Ronan wants to take her skin off. “You never want to have any fun.”

“That’s not fun, that’s trouble,” Gansey says, and the conversation is over. The others start talking again about the leyline but Ronan can’t bring herself to care. Her mind is still on Kavinsky and the plane and Eve’s sacrifice of the spring. She tries to remember her restless but happy mood of the morning, just out of reach. Still, things could be worse, she thinks, taking in a deep breath of the gasoline-scented air of the Camaro. Her eyes twitch to Gansey, who sits with her wrists draped over the steering wheel and her sunglasses perched in her hair. Things could certainly be worse.    
  



	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hoping for some distraction, she takes Chainsaw with her out to the main room where Gansey sits in her miniature Henrietta, glasses perched on the end of her nose. Though she’d wanted to see Gansey, this feels like a compromise. This, she thinks, is a Gansey that Blue could love, not her Gansey. Not the Gansey who goes on late night drives with her and cheers when she hits 90, the Gansey of two A.M. vodka and orange juice, the Gansey who had in the first summer of their friendship watched in silent but ecstatic delight as the pile of garbage pulled out of her newly acquired Monmouth burned. Still, Ronan is exhausted and restless and in dire need of company, and this soft Gansey is better than no one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, sorry I'm actually The Worst(TM) at replying to comments, I hope to do a spree of responses at some point soon but I have difficulty with it for reasons unknown, but I'm much better at responding on tumblr so if you ever wanna yell w me about lady raven squad, you can hmu [here](http://psychotic-adam-parrish.tumblr.com/). Also lmao get ready bc lots of noncanon things happen this chapter

Ronan opens her eyes. It’s the middle of the night, still hot and humid with insects loud outside and she is hurting in a way that is both entirely familiar and impossible to get used to. In her dream she’d been in her BMW, driving through the mountains as fast as she could, aware that she was dreaming and trying to get home, home, home before she woke. But of course she hadn’t made it. When she can finally move, she lifts her hand and presses a nail to her bottom lip. She’s never going home. 

Hoping for some distraction, she takes Chainsaw with her out to the main room where Gansey sits in her miniature Henrietta, glasses perched on the end of her nose. Though she’d wanted to see Gansey, this feels like a compromise. This, she thinks, is a Gansey that Blue could love, not her Gansey. Not the Gansey who goes on late night drives with her and cheers when she hits 90, the Gansey of two A.M. vodka and orange juice, the Gansey who had in the first summer of their friendship watched in silent but ecstatic delight as the pile of garbage pulled out of her newly acquired Monmouth burned. Still, Ronan is exhausted and restless and in dire need of company, and this soft Gansey is better than no one. 

Gansey looks up and waves her glue covered paintbrush in greeting. Ronan jerks her head and detours to the kitchen/bathroom/laundry room for a beer before coming to sit at the outskirts of Gansey’s town. She pops the lid off her beer and offers it to Gansey, who shakes her head, before taking a sip. 

“Up late,” Gansey comments.

“You too,” Ronan replies. 

“Were you dreaming?”

Ronan nods.

Gansey continues her work as she asks, “What of?”

“Same old,” Ronan says. Gansey looks at her, not exactly curious, but pointed, a no-nonsense look that Ronan reads as a sign that Gansey doesn’t feel like listening to evasions tonight. “Home,” Ronan says, not quite meeting Gansey’s eye. “The drive there, not the actual -- I can never get there.”

With her usual tact, Gansey shifts the conversation just enough to make Ronan more comfortable. “What was the first thing you ever took from a dream?”

“Flowers,” Ronan says, and Ganseys’ face breaks into an unexpected smile. “What?”  
“Nothing,” Gansey says, turning back to the cereal box she’s cutting up. “It would just surprise some people.”

Ronan snorts. “Some people.”

Gansey shrugs. “Not everyone knows you as well as I do.

Taking a drink, Ronan thinks,  _ that’s true enough.  _ She goes on. “I didn’t mean to, that time. But I knew what they were as soon as I woke up because I knew about --” She doesn’t finish, the word  _ mother  _ sticking as usual in her throat. “But you could tell by looking at them that they weren’t real. Some dream things are more obvious than others. But these flowers -- you don’t see that kind of blue in nature. And -- you know how in dreams the details of things get messed up? And you don’t really notice because it’s a dream and you don’t  _ see _ the way you do in real life. But then if you wake up and you remember the image from the dream and you just think -- that’s all wrong. Like dreaming a car without a passenger’s seat.”

“I’ve never had that experience,” Gansey says. 

“Well,” Ronan says, flummoxed. “You can imagine. Anyway, I could look at the flower after I woke up and see everything wrong with it. But in the dream I didn’t notice anything.”

“So it’s difficult to make things right?”

Ronan nods. “You have to be aware.”

“And how do you get to be aware?”

“I dunno, it just happens some nights and not others. It takes practice. And work. But like, not normal work. It’s not like studying or doing pushups. You can’t  _ make  _ yourself better at it just be doing it again and again.”

Gansey frowns. “I thought you said it takes practice.”

“It’ does,” Ronan says, nodding. But it’s more like -- fuck, I don’t know what it’s like. It’s like mining for diamonds. A lot of it is just luck and statistics.”

“But effort, too?”

“Yeah. But not normal effort. Like trying to open your eyes when you’re half asleep. Part of what makes it so hard is that it’s easy. I have to force myself to notice things. Like a leaf on a tree. I can force myself to look at all the veins in it.”

“But really, you’re making those veins,” Gansey says, interrupting.

“What?” Ronan says, thrown.

“Everything you’re seeing -- it’s not that you start noticing it, it’s that you brain starts creating it.”

Ronan, who has always thought of her dreams as at least somewhat autonomous things, is a little uncomfortable with this description. “I guess,” she says, not wanting to get hung up on this point. “The more I notice, the easier it is to take something. And the better it is. The more real.”

Gansey tilts her head and looks at Ronan in a way that makes her want to turn away. Not the way Ronan looks at people to make them want to look away. It’s not a threatening look, it’s just curious. But Ronan with all her carelessness of her own life is afraid of being known. Gansey says, “So you have to know a thing to take it out of your dream.”

Ronan nods briefly and drinks again. She’s aware that Gansey wants to know more about this, but it feels too intimate so instead she says, “They’re in Latin. The dreams.”

This distracts Gansey. “Latin?”

“Even before I knew what it was. Pretty weird, going to Latin class for the first time and recognizing the words. I don’t know how it got into my head. If it’s even actually from my head. I dunno. It’s fucking weird.”

“You know, my mother always said dreaming in another language was a sign you’d really mastered it. I guess not for you, though.”

“Yeah,” Ronan says. She hesitates, tongue pressed to the backs of her front teeth and then says, “The trees speak, too. In my dreams. They speak Latin.”

Gansey raises and eyebrow but says nothing because nothing needs to be said. They both understand the strangeness of this. It’s the reason Ronan brought it up, because she’s been looking for a way to explain to Gansey what it is she feels when they go to Cabeswater. Like walking into one of her own dreams, brought to life on a grander scale than she’s ever believed herself capable of.  _ Coincidence. _ The unspoken word hangs heavy. 

She shifts a little closer to Gansey and Gansey, though still working with her paintbrush, mirrors the movement. They’re close enough for Ronan to reach through a gap in the shoebox houses to touch Gansey’s knee. Her foolish heart beats faster. She waits five seconds, and when Gansey doesn’t look at her she gets up and goes to her room.

“Ronan?” Gansey calls after her, but she’s already coming back, carrying a recent dream object. 

She steps over the border of the miniature Henrietta and sits down with her knee pressed to Gansey’s thigh. “You’ll like this,” she says.

Gansey carefully sets down her materials and pushes her glasses up to the bridge of her nose before taking the little wooden box from Ronan’s hand. 

“It translates,” she says, as Gansey turns it over and over, experimenting with the buttons and watching the little wheels with their painted letters turn and turn to form words. “Dead languages, and English.”

It takes Gansey only a moment to notice the odd language out. Ronan had known she would catch on, but she’d somehow hoped to avoid being questioned. When Gansey asks about it, Ronan shrugs and says, “I don’t know.” It’s not a lie, she doesn’t know the language’s name or origin. But she fails to mention that the language is familiar in the way Cabeswater is familiar, and she knows that Gansey is aware of the half-truth. 

“I’ll do some research,” Gansey says, setting the box reverently down between them, like it’s something precious. She doesn’t take her eyes off it for such a long time that Ronan gets unnerved. 

“What is it, man?” 

Gansey looks up at her. “Oh, it’s just -- I meant it. Earlier, on the hill. You really are incredible. You almost flunk out of half your classes but somehow -- you said you have to understand things, right? So you apparently know enough about language and translation to make this thing.”

“I mean, I don’t know all the words it can translate,” Ronan says, embarrassed. “You can make a thing that -- like that flower, it would have grown if I’d dreamt it in a flowerpot even though I don’t know enough about biology to tell you how a flower grows. Chainsaw can do -- bird shit even though I don’t understand how birds fly. As long as it works in the dream --”

“It works in real life,” Gansey finishes for her. “Still.”

Ronan wishes she had something to fidget with. 

Gansey laughs a little and looks down. “You’re just a lot smarter than you think.” She looks back up, half a smile on her face, and she’s  _ so close.  _ Ronan is exhausted. She feels halfway in a dream now. Reaching out, she traces her thumb along Gansey’s cheekbone, palm coming to rest against her jaw. 

Gansey says, “Ronan.”

“Oh, fuck,” Ronan replies, and kisses her. 

Part of her -- most of her -- expects Gansey to immediately jerk back, but she doesn’t. She kisses Ronan back, very softly and very sweetly, like an apology.

She says, “Ronan,” again, quieter this time. Ronan sits back, a little horrified. 

“Fuck,” Ronan says, “I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry.  _ Fuck. _ ” Ronan puts her head in her hands, digging her nails into her shaved skull. 

“Ronan,” Gansey says, reaching out to grab Ronan’s wrists and pulling them back. “It’s okay. Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

Ronan wants to scream or cry or punch something but she doesn’t want to scream in Gansey’s face or cry in front of her, and both her wrists are being firmly held so instead she just tries not to hyperventilate and doesn’t look at Gansey. 

“I should go to bed,” she says when she can. She gets up shakily and for a moment Gansey keeps sitting, but when she’s about halfway across the room, she hears footsteps behind her and turns just as Gansey collides with her, pulling her into a firm hug. Ronan just stands with her arms at her sides, her ribcage too tight around her, needing to be alone to destroy something.

In her ear, Gansey says, “It’s okay. I’m not mad at you. I love you.” 

It’s such a useless thing. Ronan knows that, even if Gansey won’t say it. When Gansey steps back, looking up with concern into Ronan’s face, she reaches up shakily to tuck a strand of Gansey’s hair behind ear. “But you don’t want me to kiss you.”

Gansey squeezes her eyes shut. “I don’t know what I want. I think maybe I did want to kiss you.”

Ronan clenches her fists compulsively at her sides. “That’s not what I said.” It feels strange to be the one saying exactly what she means. It makes no difference to Ronan whether or not Gansey wants to kiss her if in the end she doesn’t want to be kissed. But it’s not a nuance she can put into words, and she just has to hope that Gansey understands. 

“Yeah,” Gansey says softly. And then she does the cruelest thing. She tilts Ronan’s head down and kisses her on the cheek, a hand on the back of her neck. “Go to bed,” she says.

Ronan, broken, turns and retreats to her bedroom. Chainsaw flies to her, settling on her shoulder and pressing her head to the corner of Ronan’s jaw. Together they get into Ronan’s bed and Ronan pulls her knees up close to her chest and presses her forehead to her knees and draws all the dreadful kineticism of herself deep inside, knowing all too well that it’ll come bursting out at the next inopportune moment, more hideous and violent than it is now. But for once she does the right thing and she cries, burying her face in her pillow and sobbing, hoping Gansey can’t hear her, until she’s too exhausted to do anything but lie still and quiet as Chainsaw burrows fretfully against her and the sun outside begins to rise. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gansey glances at Ronan and Ronan meets her look, shrugging her shoulders like it’s no big deal. “You know,” Ronan says, “I already have something just like this.”
> 
> Kavinsky shrugs. “Sorry man, duplication is my specialty. Anyway, Lynch, I’ll see you around when your girlfriend isn’t around to give me the evil eye. I’ll keep an eye out for your pretty car. Later.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for gendered slurs

The next time Ronan sees Josey Kavinsky is at Nino’s. 

Gansey is, incredibly, acting almost normally toward Ronan, but that doesn’t make Ronan any less of a mess. She’s hunched into her place at the booth, an unfortunate mix of ashamed and vitriolic, and getting told off by Gansey for being rude to Blue only makes matters worse. She’s ready to snap at anything when Kavinsky comes in. Theoretically, Kavinsky would be a good thing to snap at. Always game for a fight and awful enough that Ronan wouldn’t feel bad for beating the shit out of her, she should be the ideal target for Ronan’s frustration. But when she sees Kavinsky at the hostess stand, apparently doing about as good a job of pissing Blue off as Ronan had done, she only feels a sort of tense anticipation. Maybe it should feel like a relief, but it doesn’t. 

Kavinsky makes a beeline for their table and Ronan digs her fingernails into her arms.

“Sup, sluts,” Kavinsky says. Across the table from Ronan, Gansey stands up, as though Kavinsky is the kind of wild animal that can be fooled into thinking you’re a dangerous predator if you make yourself look larger. But Kavinsky’s eyes are betraying her, and Ronan knows who she’s here for. She confirms Ronan’s guess when she pulls something from her pocket and says, “I got you a present, Lynch.”

From her heavily ringed hand she dangles a tangled set of leather bracelets, and drops them in front of Ronan. 

“Aw, you know my style,” Ronan says, more to fill time than anything else as she pokes at the bracelets. She doesn’t want to give away how carefully she’s looking at them, but she wants to know how well Kavinsky, master forger, has replicated Ronan’s bracelets. It makes her stomach turn to realize that they are perfect in their symmetry with the leather straps around her wrist, down to the long scratch on the darkest of them. 

“What do you want, Kavinsky?” Gansey asks.

Kavinsky puts her hands up in a mocking gesture of surrender. “Hey, I was just being nice. See, she likes them.”

Gansey glances at Ronan and Ronan meets her look, shrugging her shoulders like it’s no big deal. “You know,” Ronan says, “I already have something just like this.”

Kavinsky shrugs. “Sorry man, duplication is my specialty. Anyway, Lynch, I’ll see you around when your girlfriend isn’t around to give me the evil eye. I’ll keep an eye out for your pretty car. Later.”

She turns on her heel and leaves. Gansey sits back down and pulls the leather bracelets from under Ronan’s fingers. “What a complete asshole,” Gansey says, examining them with more obvious care than Ronan had done. “I swear, every conversation I have with her leaves me feeling dirty.”

Ronan feels the same way, but she suspects her reasons are different from Gansey’s. Not that it had really been possible to make her feel any worse than she already does today, but still her insides are crawling. 

Gansey looks up at her and narrows her eyes. Ronan draws into herself instinctively, knowing she’s either in trouble or under investigation. “What does she want with you anyway? Do the two of you ever do anything together other than race?”

Ronan rolls her eyes. “I don’t do drugs. Mom.”

Gansey flicks the bracelets back over to her and settles back in her seat. “Anyway, what I want to know about your little puzzle box is how dream magic allows your to make something you don’t completely understand. You don’t know Sanskrit or Coptic or even Greek and your Latin is better than mine but it’s still not -- I mean, you could put the  _ disestablishmentarianism  _ or something like that into this and it would pop out a Latin translation if one exists, and I don’t even know if you could define  _ disestablishmentarianism  _ in English.”

Ronan shrugs, jarred by the shift in the conversation. “It’s dream shit. Who the fuck knows.”

“Someone, surely. We know you’re not the first person to be able to do this, and I doubt your mother was either. Surely someone has done some kind of study on this. There are so many ancient accounts of magic, some of them have to be true. Some of them might be able to explain this.”

It’s logical enough, but for whatever reason, Ronan is dead set against agreeing with her right now. “I don’t think we know shit,” she says.

“A lot of cultures believed in dreaming as a form of divination, we could always start there,” Eve says, and Gansey turns her entire attention over to her, apparently sensing that Ronan doesn’t have anything helpful to contribute. Next to Ronan, Leah shifts her ghost weight and tilts her head as if to ask,  _ what’s wrong?  _ Ronan thinks she probably knows. Leah seems to know everything. But it’s possible that the tangle of emotions Ronan is dealing with today might be confusing even to her. She shrugs and fiddles with the bracelets and wishes she knew what the fuck was going on.

 

The rest of that week is strange in Monmouth. Leah is gone even more of the time than usual, which pisses Ronan off because she could use a buffer between herself and Gansey right now and she’s pretty sure Leah is only gone because she doesn’t like it when things are weird between the friends. Gansey is trying valiantly to pretend that nothing happened and Ronan is spending most of her time in her room, trying to sort her head out. At night, when Ronan is too tired to avoid Gansey and Gansey’s attitude shifts from staunchly oblivious to apologetic, they go out to anywhere that’s open 24 hours. The car wash, the convenience store, the China Buffet. 

It’s Dollar City on the night that Eve calls and Ronan, who already feels like breaking things because when does she not feeling like breaking things, wants to light the place on fire because she can tell that Gansey is talking to Eve by the way she says “oh, hey,” and it’s exhausting to be this jealous all the time. Gansey is wearing a pair of rattty denim shorts, the kind that make up most of Ronan’s summer wardrobe, and the tank top she only uses when she’s fiddling with the Pig and which is thus covered in grease spots. Her hair is pulled back into a little ponytail and she has pricy leather flip flops on instead of her usual kitten heels. Somehow, looking less like a 1950s movie star than usual only makes her loveliness more unbearable. 

As the phone conversation continues, Gansey’s face grows concerned and she lowers the phone to her chest to inform them that Eve saw some kind of apparition in her apartment. 

Ronan bites at her leather bracelets. While the power of the leyline would suggest that  _ apparition  _ is indeed a better word for it than  _ hallucination _ , Ronan isn’t entirely unfamiliar with the world of the unreal and the incorporeal, and that’s not even counting Leah. She slides her eyes toward the other girl, who is glaring at her with what little ferocity she can manage, and Ronan suspects that Leah knows exactly the joke she’s thinking of cracking, so she refrains. All the same, she’s worried about Eve. 

Somehow, Gansey’s conversation shifts to the topic of Eve’s rent, and Ronan turns her eyes to the shelf of knick knacks in front of her even as she listens more carefully. From what she’s hearing it seems like Eve is pissed, which Ronan could have anticipated. Maybe she ought to feel a little guilt for letting Gansey take the heat for Ronan’s own actions, but the whole thing wouldn’t even be a problem if Eve wasn’t so uptight about money. The thing is, Ronan is never going to live in a world where money is actually correlated to work. For one thing she’d been raised in a family that fell to the far left of the spectrum of the American Democratic Party, but more importantly, she’s able, with sufficient focus and a bottle of beer, to wake up with a thousand dollars clutched in her hand. Even if she hadn’t thought that capitalism was bullshit as a system, she wouldn’t have been able to deny that it’s essentially meaningless when it comes to her and her family. She’s willing to respect Eve’s desire to live by her own labor, but that shouldn’t require being homeless while also working three jobs and getting A’s at a private school. Besides, Eve pays back the debt every day in a dozen ways that have nothing to do with money. 

She chances a quick look at Gansey, but her back is turned and Ronan sees only Leah, happily shaking a snow globe full of glitter. “What the fuck is that?” Ronan asks, without any real irritation. 

“Pretend winter,” Leah says, continuing to shake it. “But I don’t think real winter is pretty like this anywhere, not even in Canada.”

“No,” Ronan confirms. “It definitely doesn’t snow fucking glitter in Canada.” 

Ronan riffles through the items on the shelves until she hears a soft gasp from Leah and turns to see her gone. A split second later, the snow globe she’d been holding hits the ground and shatters, leaking its contents across the linoleum. 

Gansey has swiveled around and Ronan, not wanting the cashier who is already clearly unhappy about their presence to be there if Leah decides to pop back into existence, says, “I’ve got it.”

The cashier, annoyed but apathetic, returns to the register and her sudoku book. 

Gansey is holding the phone to her chest again and looks like she’s about to speak when Leah returns. But she doesn’t return as she usually does, cooling a room or using Blue as a source of power. Instead she uses Ronan, and Ronan isn’t used to being used as a ghost battery station, nor does she have the kind of power supply Blue does. The closest thing Ronan has ever felt to this was the time when she was a little girl and had walked out onto the thin ice covering the lake a mile’s walk from the Barns and had fallen through. It’s such an instantaneous, breathtaking cold that it feels more like a blow to the head than a drop in temperature. Back then, Declan had pulled her out of the frigid water but now the warmth returns naturally, if slowly. The worst of it is over in a moment, but it takes a while to recover.

“What the hell was that?” She asks through chattering teeth. “Don’t fucking do that, man.”

Leah blinks at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just -- everything went away. The line went away.”

Ronan and Gansey exchange glances. “I’ll go get some paper towels to tidy this up,” Gansey says, moving swiftly away from them. While she’s gone, Leah looks up sheepishly at Ronan and says, “Sorry,” again.

Gansey returns with handfuls of paper towels and crouches to clean up the mess made by the snowglobe.

“The glitter,” Leah says sadly, but neither Ronan nor Gansey have the time to consider the glitter.

“Eve’s pretty rattled by whatever it was she saw. I think it probably has something to do with this.” Gansey jerks her head toward Leah. “With you disappearing. Something’s up with the leyline.”

Ronan crosses her arms across her chest. If it were as simple as something being up with the leyline, they’d all be seeing things. Eve has tied herself to it in a way none of them understand yet, and there are bound to be consequences. Only Gansey doesn’t like to think about that. “Sure,” she says. 

They make their way out, to the cashier’s obvious relief, and Ronan makes sure to kick the door frame on the way out. 

Leah gives her a look. “That’s not going to fix it, you know.”

“Fix what?”

Leah shrugs. “You.” 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan remembers Kavinsky saying pretty car and her fingers twitch with discomfort or desire. It’s so hard to tell the difference these days. She wonders if Kavinsky’s flirting with her.

She doesn’t fall asleep with the intention of taking anything out, but she does fall asleep thinking of Kavinsky and comes into the dream knowing what she wants. In real life, she’s stowed away the bracelets Kavinsky gave her in her sock drawer with various other things she doesn’t want to think about, but in the dream she’s wearing them so there are matching pairs on both her wrists. She doesn’t like it, but she knows without trying that she’ll be unable to take them off. 

The strange thing about dreams is that she doesn’t want things in sleep the same way she does in waking life. Either way it’s intense and relentless, but in dreams she has more purpose. Perhaps not logical purpose, but still -- something, she things, like Gansey wanting to find Glyndower. Purposeful, but odd. If she were to wake at this moment, she wouldn’t be able to say why she wants Kavinsky’s glasses, but in her dream, it has something to do with the bracelets that she can’t take off. 

A tug comes at her sleeve and she turns to see Orphan Boy hunched in his oversized woolen sweater, cap pulled low over her ears. 

She takes his hand and they walk together through the woods. She’s glad of his presence, not only because it’s a good sign for her chances of taking what she wants out but also because these woods will never be familiar enough not to be fearful, and she appreciates the company. Orphan Boy buries his face in her side and she picks him up to carry him on her hip. His weight feels real and her arms begin to get tired. This, too, is a good sign. At the point that she thinks she can’t carry him any farther, she spots the glasses nestled in the moss at the foot of a tree. She sets Orphan Boy down and he hooks two fingers through one of the belt loops on her shorts when she lets go of his hand.

She bends to pick the glasses up. The plastic is warm in her hand, as though they’ve been sitting out in the sun. She unfolds them and inspects the hinge. She wants these to be perfect, to be real, opening on a tiny metal coil that works not simply because her mind wills it but because it is correctly built. Satisfied, she holds them tightly in her hand, smudging the tinted glass. Orphan Boy looks up at her with eyes already resentful, knowing she’s about to wake up. She rubs his head affectionately and then opens her eyes. 

Her body is rigid and cramped. The back of her neck is sore from sleeping at a strange angle and she closes her eyes, trying to be patient with the pain. She’s good at hurting, but she’s awful at not doing anything about it. If she cracks open one set of knuckles throwing a punch, she bites down on the other. She hates her body in the early morning, feels peculiarly aware of the jutting angles, the utter lack of grace. There are moments when she can see a rough sort of handsomeness in herself, when she’s wearing a suit or her favorite fitted tank top, but here at the moment of waking she feels unable to pretend that she is anything other than a bony, wiry animal. Her self confidence swings like a pendulum, and waking is the worst point of its trajectory. 

Finally able to move, she shakes herself and sits, knowing that if she doesn’t get up quickly the misery will keep her in bed until noon. She holds up the glasses and is pleased to find them exactly as they were in the dream. Perfectly real, perfectly like Kavinsky’s. She’ll keep them for the next time she sees her, which shouldn’t be too long from now. Kavinsky had said she’d keep an eye out for Ronan. It’s summer and they’re two bored kids always looking for trouble. There’s only so long they can go before whatever fucked up magnetic charge they have going kicks in. Ronan remembers Kavinsky saying  _ pretty car  _ and her fingers twitch with discomfort or desire. It’s so hard to tell the difference these days. She wonders if Kavinsky’s flirting with her. She’s ready to believe either that it’s true and she’s the last one to notice it or that Kavinsky sees her only as a kid with poor impulse control and a fast car. It’s not the kind of thing she’s particularly good at figuring out.  _ So literal,  _ Gansey always says, and it’s true because Ronan, who believes in honesty if nothing else keeps being taken by surprise when other people fail to say what they mean. 

She polishes the lenses of the glasses and goes out in her pajamas to put them into the glove compartment of her BMW. On her way out she sees Gansey at her desk and makes the kind of grunted greeting that’s easiest to get away with when she can plead sleepiness. When she comes back in, Gansey looks up at her and smiles sheepishly for a moment before returning to her reading. Ronan comes over, leaning over Gansey to look at her book. 

“What the fuck, Gansey. It’s summer. It’s Saturday. It’s a summer Saturday. And it’s before noon. What the fuck could you possibly need to read about.”

“Three guesses,” Gansey says drily, not looking up from the page.

“Come on, go out with me. We can walk the leyline.”

Gansey checks her watch. “Eve’s at work.” 

Ronan steps back and crosses her arms across her chest. “Okay,” she says. “Fine.” But she can’t help herself and after only a few moments adds, “You know, we used to look without her.”

“ _ Ronan! _ ” Gansey turns in her chair to stare at her. She looks horrified. 

“What?” Ronan says, shrugging. “It’s true. It used to be just you and me.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not anymore,” Gansey says, turning her back to Ronan again.

“Oh, knock it off,” Ronan says. There’s silence for a minute and then Gansey slams her book shut and stands, turning to face Ronan.

“You knock it off,” she says. “You know I wouldn’t go anywhere without all of us here so why would you ask? Because you want to get pissed at me for saying no. I’m sick of it.”

Ronan shrinks into herself, knowing that she doesn’t catch herself quick enough to hide it. Her shoulders come forward and her chin draws back, a child’s posture of sulky retreat. The worst part of this is that she can’t tell what Gansey’s really mad about. She doesn’t know if it’s really about her wanting to go exploring without Eve or if it’s because of the kiss, and she knows she’s not supposed to ask. Still, it’s infuriating, knowing Gansey won’t actually say what she’s feeling and knowing that if she points this out it’ll just lead to a bigger fight. Knowing she’s too tired to deal with that. 

“Whatever, man,” she says, shrugging her shoulders in a big gesture meant more to release the tension in her body than to express anything. “I’m just bored and wanted to get out of the apartment.” 

Gansey rubs at the bridge of her nose. “Fine. Go out. Race Kavinsky, wreck your car.”

“Okay,” Ronan says, and goes to her room to collect her keys. She feels an awful delight in knowing how thoroughly Gansey will regret, is probably already regretting, her words. Sure enough, her expression is muted when Ronan returns to the main room.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says.

“Yeah, well it sounds like a damn good plan to me.”

“Ronan --”

But Ronan doesn’t hear Gansey’s last words because the sound of the slamming of the door drowns them. She has a sick feeling that they were probably  _ don’t go _ . Standing alone in the stairwell, she holds onto the splintered railing and wonders whether Gansey will come out to talk to try to get her to come back. She counts to ten. There’s no footsteps from inside the apartment. She’s wrecking everything. It’s not like she’s had many relationships to fuck up in the past, but she has the sense that it starts with shit like this, pointless vengefulness, failures to apologize, no one saying what they mean. Two people standing on either side of a door, wondering who will open it first. 

This is a waste of time. She shoves her car keys into her pocket and goes down the stairs. The whole world looks better from behind the wheel of her BMW. She rides around town, keeping half an eye out for Kavinsky, reaching over at a stoplight to fidget with the handle of the glove compartment. As tempted as she is to drive down the road to the Barns, it feels wrong to do it during the day. It’s a ritual she allows herself only in the small, dark hours of the morning, going 90 all along the highway and stopping just miles from home to sit alone, hand gripping at the steering wheel, until the demon leaves her and she makes a sharp turn in the road to go back to Monmouth. She’s never met another car on that drive. Not the sort of thing that lends itself to sunlight. 

On this particular Saturday, though, Kavinsky is nowhere to be found. Ronan even drives by Nino’s, eyes sweeping over the cars in the parking lot, but the truth is that Henrietta is small enough that finding Kavinsky’s car should be an easy task. Its absence from the streets and the lots of local stores seems a sure sign that it’s in the parking garage behind the Aglionby dorms where residential students can leave their cars. It’s hard to imagine Kavinsky spending a summer day idly in her room, but Ronan is hard pressed to come up with an alternative. Probably, she thinks, directing the BMW regretfully back to the apartment, Josey and her pack are lying on some Aglionby roof stoned out of their minds. As much as she doesn’t want to go back to Gansey right now, she can’t pretend she’d rather be with that crowd. Kavinsky herself is one thing, but all of them together overwhelm with their bubblegum femininity. If they hadn’t, she might have fallen in with them before Gansey came to Aglionby. As it is, more than twenty minutes at a time with them makes her start to feel like an exhibit at the zoo. 

When she gets back to Monmouth, she’s relieved to see Leah sitting at the curb. Finally, Leah there when Ronan needs her. She parks the car and gets out to sit next to her, slinging an arm around her. It’s more an expedient to shake off some of the oppressive heat that settles into her skin the instant she leaves the air conditioning of the car than an expression of friendship, but Ronan doesn’t see why it can’t be both. Neither does Leah, apparently, because she cuddles up against Ronan and sighs happily.

“Hey, I’ve missed you,” she says.

“Missed you too, asshole,” Ronan replies. “It’s your own damn fault you know, you’re the one who’s been vacationing in the fucking ether.”

“Yeah,” Leah says, apparently not particularly hurt by this comment. “You and Gansey are being all weird.”

“No kidding,” Ronan says. “Doesn’t mean you have to bail on us.”

Leah looks up at her with a distinctly petulant expression and says, “I don’t like it.”

“Fucking wuss,” Ronan says.

“Fucking asshole,” Leah says, and Ronan grins. Leah swears infrequently and it always sounds somehow experimental, like a kid trying out bad words for the first time.

“Can we just sit outside for a while?” Ronan asks.

“As long as you don’t faint in the heat.”

“Hey, I’ve got you to keep me cool.”

Leah grumbles something about not being a portable sack of ice cubes but doesn’t make any objection stronger than that.

“I just don’t really want to go in,” Ronan says, softer than she would to anyone else.

“Yeah,” Leah says. Her eyes twitch up to meet Ronan’s. “I know.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But he does make it in time, slipping into their pew just before the procession starts and leaving a Leah-shaped space between himself and Ronan, though Ronan’s pretty sure he can’t see her. She’s also pretty sure that space would be there even if Leah wasn’t, the habitual distance needed between them to prevent a fight from breaking out, though neither of them would dare throw a punch in this building.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: mentions of drugs, suicide, homophobic slurs

The next day is Sunday, the one and only day of the week that Ronan is awake before Gansey. She’s up at nine o’clock for the St. Agnes service at ten -- summer hours, and a relief to Ronan who hates waking up at eight on a weekend but would never miss mass -- and slipping through the main room, careful not to wake Gansey, at half past. Henrietta is quiet on Sunday morning, most of the other cars on the road on their way to church as well. Though she doesn’t socialize much at St. Agnes these days, many of the people in the parking lot are familiar to her from childhood, the same couples who were there as regularly as her own family and used to give her cookies after the service, on the steps. She’d been sweeter and more sociable then, though never quite as presentable as the other children. There’s a boy, roughly her age, on whose foot she remembers stomping when he put his hand into then-big hair. Running her hand over the beginning of tight curls -- she’ll shave her head again tonight, another Sunday ritual -- she goes into the church and immediately spots Mary with her still-big hair in their usual pew. No Declan though. She hadn’t been thinking of how much she’d been dreading meeting him but still a coil of anxiety releases in the pit of her stomach when she notes his absence. Leah, who hadn’t been in the car with her -- catches her by the elbow.

“Hey, Leah,” Ronan says.

“Hi.” 

Her presence at the church is usual, for reasons entirely incomprehensible to Ronan. Her father, long before he’d gone silent, had told her that all things were revealed at the moment of death which had started, long before her depression made it a more serious thing, her fascination with death. With a twist of the stomach she realizes yes, even as a child she had wanted to die, even if for reasons different and more innocent than the ones she has these days. She still believes what her father had told her, so it’s hard to understand why Leah would consider conversion after death, but she doesn’t mind the company, and Mary loves her. They slide together into the pew and Mary greets them happily, squeezing Ronan tight with a whisper of, “Hey sweetheart” -- a distinctly maternal endearment that Ronan would only ever accept from her sister -- before she leans past her to give Leah a quick hug. 

“Where’s Declan?” Ronan asks. 

Mary shrugs, unconcerned. “I’m sure he’ll show up.” 

Ronan checks her watch. It’s only a few minutes until mass starts. It’s very unlike Declan to be late. 

But he does make it in time, slipping into their pew just before the procession starts and leaving a Leah-shaped space between himself and Ronan, though Ronan’s pretty sure he can’t see her. He’s also pretty sure that space would be there even if Leah wasn’t, the habitual distance needed between them to prevent a fight from breaking out, though neither of them would dare throw a punch in this building. But that’s not what Ronan is thinking about. Ronan is thinking about the enormous bruise taking up most of the side of his face and his swollen nose. 

She elbows Mary in the ribs and jerks her head. Mary’s eyes widen. “What happened to him?”

“I can hear you,” he hisses over the sound of the opening hymn. 

“So what the hell happened to you?” Ronan says, restating Mary’s question.

“I got robbed.”

“In Henrietta?” Ronan says, hoping he knows by her tone that she’s not so much questioning his honesty as telling him she doesn’t believe him.

“Where else,” Declan says, eyes fixed on the front of the church. Ronan rolls her eyes. “Would’ve been nice if you’d picked up the phone when I called you.”

“Wait,” Ronan says, a grin spreading on her face. “Were you trying to call me _while you were being robbed?_ Damn, Declan.”  
“You’re an asshole.”

“Guys,” Mary says, a little distressed. “We’re in church, don’t swear.”

“Listen, I’ve been hearing stuff about you and Josephine Kavinsky.”

Ronan snorts, partially because she can’t remember the last time she heard someone call Josey  _ Josephine.  _

“I’m not kidding around, you should stay away from her.” He raised an eyebrow significantly at her and she returned the expression. They were on the last verse of the hymn and their cover for a whispered conversation would soon be gone. She just had to wait it out. 

Leah leaned into her and asked, “Does Josey K do drugs?”

Ronan gave her a look somewhere between  _ we’re in church  _ and  _ how are you this naive after seven years of afterlife.  _

Declan continues, “I know you like to do dumb shit but there’s a serious difference between the dumb shit you do and the dangerous shit she does and I am telling you not to cross that line. I have enough to worry about with you and your goddamn car, do not make me bury you before you hit twenty.”

Mary makes a horrified squeaking sound and Ronan blissfully contemplates herself in her BMW shooting off the edge of a mountain road toward a fiery death. 

“Twenty-one,” she says. “So I can get in a drink before the bitter end.”

Mary makes another squeak and Declan makes a derisive sound that sums up his unspoken commentary on the idea that Ronan needs to be twenty-one to have a drink. 

The opening hymn ends and they both shut up. Ronan turns her attention as best she can to the cross hanging above the altar and, as usual, feels a stab of pain.  _ Oh God.  _ The words of the mass, more familiar in her mouth than any more modern phrases, settle her a little but as soon as she kneels to pray, she remembers what an awful thing the inside of her head is.  _ Oh God forgive me, oh God forgive me, oh God forgive me _ . There are tears pressing at the insides of her eyelids. She doesn’t know why this always happens. At communion she keeps her head lowered as she puts her hands out for the bread and thinks,  _ oh God, what am I?  _ The wine makes her throat feel warm. Church has become so strange for her in recent times, a place where she somehow feels at once the possibility of hope and a sense of absolute devastation. It’s difficult to stop thinking of herself as a monstrosity when she’s here. Still, she’d never miss it. Once, last winter, she’d been down with the flu and couldn’t come to mass and for the rest of the week she’d felt unbalanced somehow. It’s as necessary to her as food. 

After the service they go out together and find Declan’s girlfriend (still the same one as that night at Nino’s, Ronan notes with some surprise) waiting on the steps. 

Conversationally, Ronan says, “You know, I’ve heard that churches have raised thresholds so demons will trip and not be able to get in.”

Girlfriend launches into a speech about the Catholic Church’s exclusion of women and Ronan finds it difficult not to roll her eyes. She’d have more sympathy if it didn’t sound like a thirty second sound byte from the representative of a feminist superpac. The thing is, her rant is so devoid of any sense of personal investment or feeling that it sounds more like an excuse for not getting up on Sunday mornings than a genuine opinion. Besides which, as a very obviously gay black woman, Ronan can’t help feeling a little indignant at being lectured by a blonde sorority girl about church politics.

“Neato,” she says, and skips down the rest of the steps, and Mary follows her to her car to give her a goodbye hug.

“I’ll let you know if I find out more about those robbers,” she says.

“You know they’re not really robbers,” Ronan says. “We’re in Henrietta Virginia, we don’t even have aspiring robbers.”

“We have Josey Kavinsky, though. What was that all about?”

Ronan shrugs. “I dunno. We don’t actually hang out.”

“I hope she doesn’t get you into trouble.”

“I just told you we don’t hang out.”

“Okay,” Mary says amiably. “I don’t think Declan would believe you though.”

“You do, right?”

“Of course.”

“Declan’s the liar, anyway,” Ronan says.

Mary grins. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s true. He’s taking me to lunch today you know.”

“Oh god,” Ronan says. “Good luck with that.”  
“He’s not so bad,” Mary says. “He’s getting me a sloppy joe at the diner.”

Sometimes Ronan wishes Mary wasn’t so easy to bribe, but she’d used the same tactic herself too many times to really blame Declan. “Hey,” she says, “don’t let him talk you into anything shitty just because he bought you your favorite lunch.” 

Mary makes a face. “What’s he gonna try to talk me into?”

Ronan doesn’t say  _ spying on me _ . Instead she hugs Mary again. “Just stay sharp, okay?”

“Okay,” Mary says, and gives Ronan another of her easy, affectionate smiles before hurrying back to join Declan and girlfriend. Leah has dematerialized. 

She sits in the front seat of the car for a moment before putting her keys in the engine, trying to rebalance herself after church. It always feels like a shock to move from St. Agnes back into the real world. Somehow all the edges seem harder, the mundanity more difficult to bear. It’s always been difficult for her to understand how people manage to care about anything other than those they love and God. It’s always been difficult for her to understand how they leave the house of God and just return to their daily lives. Maybe she should be a nun. She doesn’t think nuns get to have cars, though. She drives out of the parking lot. 

It starts as just driving around town to avoid going back to Monmouth. She doesn’t know how long she can go avoiding Gansey, but she’s hasn’t quit yet. But the longer she drives, the more intent she becomes. Now, she’s looking for a race, watching the cars around her, looking for that well-known type that might give her what she wants. And then, when she’s not even looking, Kavinsky’s unmistakable Mitsubishi pulls up next to her at a red light. Ronan checks her rearview mirror. No one in sight. A perfectly desolate Sunday morning. They both roll down their windows. 

“Dyke,” Kavinsky says.

The sting is old, familiar. Almost comfortable. “Russian,” Ronan says.

“I’m wounded,” Kavinsky says, tone bored. The light turns green. Neither of them move. 

Ronan reaches for the glove compartment and tosses the dream glasses through Kavinsky’s open window. As she realizes what they are, Kavinsky begins to smile, an expression both awful and pretty. She looks at them, pulling her own sunglasses off to compare. The shade of the glass isn’t quite right, but otherwise they’re perfect. 

“Not too shabby,” she says. She looks up at the stoplight, which has turned back to red. She turns her shitty grin to Ronan. “Yeah?” She says.

“Yeah,” Ronan says. 

The noise when they both take off at the turning of the light is glorious. Kavinsky is ahead from the beginning, but Ronan had known she would be. Races aren’t about the beginning. Ronan’s hand is steady on the gearshift, moving smoothly while Kavinsky’s shifts are jerky and obvious. Such a shitty driver with such a pretty car. It’s the shift from third to fourth that sends Ronan far ahead while Kavinsky screams at her and waves her extended middle finger out her window. Ronan just keeps going, heart wide and delighted. She remembers what Gansey had said about her and how she couldn’t beat Kavinsky in her BMW. How little faith she’d had in Ronan. How little faith she’d had in her beautiful car. In this moment, it’s a little less painful to think about Gansey. She doesn’t want to stop feeling this way.  _ Oh God,  _ she thinks, and it doesn’t hurt. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summer always has shocked Ronan this way because spring tricks her into thinking that everything is alive again. But as May wears on, the trees grow more leaves, and the coloring even of the grass grows richer until it’s impossible to process the color. With all her hatred of the heat, Ronan loves that the living natural world makes her feel a little more alive, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for mentions of abuse

It’s getting easier to be around Gansey. Some of the awkwardness of the first few days after the kiss has worn off and, if nothing else, it’s tiring to spend so much time away from her. So Ronan is pleased rather than anxious when Gansey announces that they’re all taking a trip to Cabeswater -- their first in a long time. Ronan thinks Gansey’s sudden decision that the forest is now safe enough for exploration is pretty arbitrary and has more to do with her own desire to continue with the search than any calculation about the risk, but she’s not about to argue. She misses Cabeswater and she’s bored out of her mind and she misses the group. She’ll take what she can get. 

They take the Pig out down the old familiar roads, now green beyond belief. Summer always has shocked Ronan this way because spring tricks her into thinking that everything is alive again. But as May wears on, the trees grow more leaves, and the coloring even of the grass grows richer until it’s impossible to process the color. With all her hatred of the heat, Ronan loves that the living natural world makes her feel a little more alive, too. That said, the temperature seems likely to kill her before she can take too much pleasure in feeling alive. The Pig’s airco is only about three percent functional, as usual, and rolling down the window only does a certain amount of good. All the same, the feeling of giddy excitement in the car is infectious and it’s impossible to really sulk. 

She sticks her hand out the window and feels the air rushing by. She wishes her whole body could feel like that. She wishes she could move at 80 miles an hour without a car. Behind her, Eve is humming a tune and Blue is trying to match it but he keeps going off key and laughing, and Leah is conducting to a completely different beat. Every once in a while, Gansey glances back at them, smiling fondly. She alone of the group is lacking the manic energy of the afternoon, and Ronan wonders what she’s thinking. She seems tense, gripping the steering wheel instead of draping her wrists over it as she so often does. This Gansey is intent, purposeful, expecting some kind of result from their visit. It’s not just a casual exploration to her -- though truth be told, it never is. Recently Ronan has started wondering about Gansey, about her increasing dedication to the quest and her greater sense of urgency. Always before she’d had a somewhat lackadaisical attitude toward finding Glyndower -- not that she didn’t take it seriously, but she was alright with taking her time. She  _ wanted,  _ it seemed sometimes to Ronan, to take her time. Things are a little different now. Gansey has gotten impatient. Ronan can’t help wondering if it’s just that she’s gotten tired of the waiting or if she’s operating on some new and hidden timeline that she’s not telling the rest of them about. Maybe it’s the royal favor she’s thinking of. Does she want to get Eve a full ride scholarship to college? Get Ronan to graduate? Help Blue get the money to travel? She glances in the side mirror at Leah. Maybe that’s the real reason behind Gansey’s new determination to track down her queen. Maybe what this is really about is the discovery that one of her best friends is actually dead. If Glyndower had found a way to stay alive through the centuries, surely she could somehow restore Leah to true life. It strikes her that she can’t think of a single thing that Gansey would ask for herself. But she’s that type, and it’s part of why Ronan loves her. 

She turns her attention back to the woods beyond the edges of the highway. They’re getting close now, and Ronan is feeling more giddy by the minute. All through the end of the spring and the beginning of the summer she’s been trying not to think about Cabeswater, knowing that she can’t go there. Dwelling on it only makes the missing, almost like her homesickness for the Barns, worse. But now she’s going back and she can almost feel the sense of relief that will come over her as soon as she steps into the forest. She’s known all her life that she’s meant for the country, that even a small town like Henrietta makes her feel cramped and confined and dead, but she hadn’t known how true it was until she’d been kept away from nature -- real nature, not the few lines of trees along the roads in town. Going back feels like coming up from underwater, air in the lungs after going too long with a brain starved of oxygen. She’d tried to explain this to Gansey and the closest she could come was saying, “Imagine not being allowed to read for months at a time and then having a book put in your hands.”

Gansey had nodded slowly and said, “Food to the hungry.” It was understood between them.

Now the anticipation of it is more terrible than the months she’s spent away, her patience decreasing with proximity. But then they turn the final corner, the Pig beginning to slow, and Ronan leans out the window to see -- nothing. The field with the raven made of oyster shells is still there, but it extends far beyond its usual bounds and slopes upperward into a hill and then down into farming country. The car stops. Ronan stops. She blinks, but the world does not reset itself. Cabeswater does not return. She settles back into her seat, and they all stare out the windshield at the place where the forest should be, but there’s nothing, neither trees nor any signs of devastation, none of the marks that would have to be left if something awful had happened to them. But something awful must have happened to them, because they’re all gone. 

A conversation begins that Ronan neither takes part in nor hears, because she’s feeling something oddly akin to what she’d felt that morning when she’d found her mother -- a grief that was part panic, part loss, part disbelief. On a miniature scale, of course, but in some sense the same feeling. She’s vaguely aware of Gansey turning the Pig around, but the world has gone soft again, terrible and unreal. It’s only when the engine begins to sputter and car to slow that she snaps back into it. When the car has come to a full stop, she takes a deep breath and begins to swear loudly and fluently, not pausing as she opens the door to get out and walk, fists clenched at her sides in fury. She picks up a stone and throws it as hard as she can, but it’s not enough. She knows nothing would really be enough. She could get in a fight that took all the air out of her lungs, all the force out of her muscles, and still it wouldn’t wrench this feeling out of her chest. It would take some new and miraculous surgery to do that. She stuffs her fist into her mouth and screams around it. 

From the car, Blue yells something about how unhelpful she’s being, and she resists the urge to turn and flip him off. He knows only that she’s pissed off, not that she’s in colossal, inexplicable pain. He doesn’t know that for her, it’s pretty much the same thing. She kicks and throws things until she’s used up enough of her energy to sit still again and wallow in her sadness, and by the time she gets back, Gansey has her phone out and is fidgeting with it nervously. Her look is so sheepish when she turns to face her that Ronan knows something is off. 

“Gansey?” She says through the open window. “What did you do?”

“I called your brother to bring us a new battery.”

“Fuck,” Ronan says, standing upright again and turning away from the car. “You fucking didn’t.”

“It was the only thing to do,” Blue says, tone stiff. He’s clearly had enough of her today. “I for one am hoping to get back home tonight.”

Ronan braces herself and then gets back in the car, slouching in the front seat.

“It really was the only solution we could think of,” Gansey says, and unlike Blue, she sounds genuinely apologetic. Ronan doesn’t respond, and for a while they sit in silence. Then, on the horizon, she spots Declan’s car. In an instinctive moment of panic, she gets up and begins to squeeze into the backseat. “Scoot, maggot,” she says to Blue. He has plenty of room given that Leah has long since vanished (typical, Ronan thinks to herself), but he still grumbles about it.

“Ronan, what are you --” Eve begins to ask before Ronan flings herself across the backseat with her head in Eve’s lap and her feet propped on the windowsill beside Blue. Eve is beginning to push her off when Ronan opens her eyes and looks up with her best kicked puppy expression. 

“Please,” she says. “I want to piss Declan off without talking to him. Do me a solid.” 

Eve rolls her eyes but allows Ronan to remain. By the time Declan has pulled over and approached the car, Ronan has assumed what she hopes looks like a convincing napping position. Gansey leaves the car to talk to him and take the new battery. Eve, in her slow, hesitating voice, says, “Someone hit your brother.”

“I saw,” Ronan says. “Sometime before Sunday. He won’t tell me the truth about it, so it’s probably important.”

“So you’re still trying to find out?” Blue asks.

Ronan snorts. “Important to him, not to me. I don’t give a fuck.” For a while, they sit in silence, then Ronan hears Declan’s voice, closer than she’d expected and obviously directed at her. Her eyelids twitch.

“I don’t know how many times I have to tell you to stay out of trouble before it sinks in but I’m going to try again anyway. Stay out of trouble. Quit racing or I’ll take away your precious BMW.”

Ronan doesn’t open her eyes to say, “I’d like to see you try.”

Declan makes a brief sound before Gansey cuts him off. “Thank you so much for the battery, Declan. We’ll be seeing you later.” There’s a brief pause during which Ronan can hear her brother’s retreating footsteps. Then Gansey says, “Eve, help me out with this.”

Ronan sits to let her out, scooting over to take her place as soon as she’s scrambled between the two front seats, leaving Ronan and Blue alone in the back, staring straight ahead to where the other two are working over the hood. 

“You really hate him,” Blue says softly, and Ronan turns to look at him.

“Yeah, well, he’s a prick,” she says, turning away again.

“I thought you just didn’t like him because he’s a liar. That’s what you always say.”

“And you think it’s more?” Ronan says, raising an eyebrow at him. “Here to psychoanalyze me?”  
Blue doesn’t drop his gaze but stares at Ronan steadily, jaw set. “After he talks to you, you look the way Eve does when she talks about her dad. But like, with the volume turned down.”

“Yeah, well,” Ronan says. “No one is as shitty as Eve’s dad, not even Declan.”

“But he’s still pretty shitty.”

“He never hit me,” Ronan says, hoping that her tone conveys how ready she is for this conversation to be over. 

“He doesn’t have to hit you to be shitty,” Blue says evening, and Ronan is relieved when Gansey opens the front door and sits back down in the driver’s seat. 

“Don’t you even think about taking shotgun, Parrish,” Ronan says, clambering back out to let Eve in before taking her usual spot. The engine starts and the begin to drive back to town and Ronan stares at the leaves that had seemed so bright and green and beautiful on the drive up and wondering how everything has gone so dark so quickly, the taste in her mouth sour and metallic. 


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In her dreams, Eve Parrish is never a simple thing, always either too vivid or subtly unreal, blurred around the edges. Tonight she is soft, almost ready to dissolve into the mist that fills the forest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter with the dream mask so it's kinda gory

Ronan goes to bed knowing she’s going to have a nightmare. She knows by now that it’s a stupid thing to do, but knowing doesn’t make it any easier to avoid doing it. She goes to bed expecting a nightmare, and this is what she gets.

Orphan Boy is huddled at her side and in front of her stands Eve. In her dreams, Eve Parrish is never a simple thing, always either too vivid or subtly unreal, blurred around the edges. Tonight she is soft, almost ready to dissolve into the mist that fills the forest. As is so often the case, the forest is not only a forest but also a room at the Barns, a spare room that no one ever lived in as far as Ronan knows, used mostly for storage of what she can now recognize as dream things. They litter the space around her and Eve, hanging on walls that are also trees, scattered across tables that are also rocks. Ronan thinks about the duplicity of her own mind.

She notices the bare nail in a tree next to Eve before she notices the thing in Eve’s hand. Something isn’t where it ought to be. When she sees what Eve is holding, she opens her mouth to cry out, but she can’t speak. Her limbs are locked as in the moments after waking and it’s only after Eve has put the hideous mask over her face that Ronan is able to move.

Too late she cries her warning, blood pumping in her ears  _ too late, too late, too late.  _ Ronan knows her mother – knew her mother – and understands instinctively that Eve should never have touched the mask, let alone put it on. As Ronan lunges forward,  _ too late, too late _ , to try to stop her, Eve reels back in pain and horror, prying at the mask, scratching so viciously at her jaw where the wood of the mask has melded to skin that her hands come away bloody. Ronan goes lightheaded. Is it possible to faint in a dream? She trips over a tree root. This, she understands, is the edge of waking. Her hand is around Eve’s wrist. If she pulls Eve out, will it be the real Eve or a false one? If she pulls her out, will she be beyond help?  _ Keep dreaming. _

As though to help her with this task, Orphan Boy buries his face in her thigh. For the first time, she makes herself really look at Eve, or rather at the mask. Huge, hideous grin that had so frightened her as a child. Which so frightens her now. There’s nothing behind the eyes, no trace of Eve. Desperate, she reaches out and puts her hands up and tears at the mask – and immediately it comes away. She stares at it in amazement. This is never how her nightmare ends. She never manages to save her friends. Always she falls short, always she fails. Just as she’s about to laugh at the miracle of it, she sees the blood dripping from the wood and when she turns her face back to Eve’s, she gags in repulsion and something like grief.

Eve’s hands are quivering in front of what used to be her face. The skin has been flayed off. What remains – the mask was horrific. This Eve would not survive if Ronan brought her back to the waking world. Ronan, unable to breath, looks down at the mask in her hands, this dreadful Lynch invention, and wakes up.

“Ronan.”

She’s not sure if the voice woke her, or if it’s reacting to her waking. Useless, frozen body. Useless, frozen lungs. Is she having a panic attack before she can fully open her eyes?

“Ronan.”

The voice is Leah’s. It has an immediately soothing effect on Ronan and she feels herself able to breathe when Leah’s cold hand settles on her shoulder, even as her limbs remain locked. But when she speaks again there’s a tremor. “Ronan, you need to wake up.”

Slowly, painfully, Ronan’s body begins working again, but her panic is returning also. If she’s dragged Eve out of her dreams, they’ll have a body on their hands, and the implications for the real Eve are hazy enough that Ronan’s first instinct is to shout for Gansey to call the church line, whether or not there’d be someone to answer the phone at whatever hour of the morning it is. But before she turns her head to look, she hears. Slothful tick of claws against the wood floor, familiar enough that it should have lost its terror by now. But part of the magic of the Night Horrors is that they never cease to frighten. The fear, too, may be familiar, but it’s still powerful. Tonight, the real fear comes from the knowledge that it isn’t just her they could hurt.

“Leah,” Ronan says, voice soft and taut. It’s a useless precaution, trying not to startle the Night Horror, but Ronan is acting on instinct rather that reason. Nothing new in that. “We need to get out of here and we need to lock it in.”

Leah nods rapidly, clearly scared. No reason to be, Ronan thinks. It’s not like she can die again. All the same, she grabs Leah’s hand and squeezes it in a manner that she hopes comes off as reassuring before bolting for the door. They’re on the other side in the flash of an eye, slamming the door shut behind them, but the heavy body of the Night Horror slams against it just a second later. Ronan braces herself against the door.

The main room of Monmouth is lit only by the faint trace of light on the horizon. From here, she can see that Gansey isn’t in bed.

“Where the fuck is she,” Ronan says under her breath.

“In the Pig,” Leah replies immediately

Ronan gives her a look but doesn’t ask how she knows. She considers the situation. The Night Horror is contained for now, but who knows how long that will last. Leah won’t and probably can’t fight the thing. She needs Gansey. She needs her right now. “Go get her.”

Leah scurries away immediately and Ronan remains, braced against the door, trying to figure out what she’s going to say to explain this.  _ I know you think my brain is beautiful and everything and I hate to ruin the illusion, I really do, but you see actually most of what I dream is ugly and awful and wants to rip my throat out.  _ Gansey won’t look at her the same after this. But she’s been living on borrowed time anyway, as far as that’s concerned. All this time she’s really just been waiting for Gansey to see her mistake in befriending Ronan. Time to face the music, or what fucking ever.

Gansey and Leah appear in the doorway.

“Ronan,” Gansey says, eyes tired and worried.

_ She’d be so much happier without you _ , Ronan thinks to herself. Out loud, she says, “There’s something I need to show you. I think it’ll explain a lot.”

Gansey’s frown deepens. “Why’s your door closed?”

“I’ve told you I’m shitty at controlling what comes out of my dreams. Sometimes there are accidents.”

“Accidents.” Her tone has frosted over and Ronan wants to slam her head back against the door behind her, repeatedly.

“Like. When Leah found me. Last year.” She doesn’t think about it often, and even now, talking about it, her mind skitters away from the recollection. Hospital fluorescents, the pity and discomfort of others choking her in equal measure like the stench of flowers, Declan pissed off, Mary scared, Gansey dumbfounded. Leah unable to meet her eyes. Never in her life had she felt so alienated from everyone and everything. How strange to think she’d nearly escaped all of it. She closes her eyes. “I made a promise not to tell anyone. But it’s out of my hands.”

“Ronan,” Gansey says, tone cautious. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“There’s a monster in my bedroom.” The sentence sounds so much like the title of a children’s storybook that she can’t help but snort a little. “I’m not joking. It got out of my dream and it’s going to try to kill me if we don’t kill it first.”

Gansey takes a moment to digest this. Really, she takes it quite heroically. She puts her hands into the pockets of her little polka-dotted sleep shorts and says, “Well, we had better kill it then, hadn’t we?”

Ronan lets out a sharp breath. Certainly this is going better than she’d expected. “Okay,” she says. “It’s right behind the door. It’s big and it’s fucking vicious as all hell –“

“I’d expect no less,” Gansey says, but Ronan ignores her.

“It can be killed, though. I’ve done it before.”

“What do we have to do the job?” Gansey asks. For reasons she can’t articulate, Ronan is touched by how practical Gansey is being about all this.

“Well,” Ronan says, looking around. “That broom. There are some empty beer bottles in the kitchen, we can break those, use the glass to stab it. I think there’s a box cutter in my room.”

“Why do you have a box cutter?” Gansey asks.

“To cut boxes,” Ronan replies evenly. “Other than that there’s not too much, it’s not like I keep guns. If we were at the Barns –“ but she leaves that thought unfinished.

“Okay,” Gansey says. It’s obvious that she’s putting a brave face on, but Ronan is grateful nonetheless. “I’ll go get some beer bottles and then we go in.” She looks around. “Where did Leah go?”

“Gone, probably,” Ronan says, tone harsh. “Typical.”

Gansey goes to the kitchen to grab the bottles, breaking them at the neck against one of the pillars, which shouldn’t be sexy but somehow is. She hands one to Ronan, who steps back from the door.

“Ready?” She asks. Gansey nods. Ronan reaches forward to turn the doorknob and the two of them rush in together, Ronan pulling the door shut swiftly behind them. Glancing at Gansey, Ronan thinks she maybe should have done more to warn her about what she’d meant by  _ monster _ . The shock is clear on her face, and they don’t have time for shock right now. The thing is enormous and dark and dripping with some unidentifiable oily substance, and in the waking world, its anatomy doesn’t make sense. All the same, Ronan takes a stab at what she hopes is the creature’s neck. The skin is tough, though, and she barely scratches it.

Even though Ronan hadn’t managed to do any real damage, the Night Horror is enraged by the attack, rearing and flying at Ronan. Finally, Gansey snaps into action, flinging herself at it and managing to knock it off balance for long enough to let Ronan get out of its warpath. She, too, tries ineffectively to grind the glass into its skin. On his perch, Chainsaw screeches. The Night Horror tosses, throwing Gansey off its back and rolling across the floor. She’s up in a moment, snatching the box cutter off Ronan’s desk and lunging again as Ronan smashes a full bottle of vodka over its head. With one arm that is part claw and part wing, it knocks Ronan down and moves over her, pinning her to the ground. Out of her peripheral vision she sees Gansey jump onto its back and, just as it’s lifting one arm or wing or claw to slash at Ronan, Gansey sinks the box cutter as deep as she can into the monster’s throat, dragging it across. Ronan scuttles out of the way as dark, oily blood spills and the thing crumples. Both girls step back, gasping and shaking.

“Holy shit,” Ronan says.

“Yeah,” Gansey replies.

“Thanks.”

They’re both absolutely filthy and have scratches along their arms and legs. Ronan’s pretty sure Gansey will have some pretty nasty bruising from how she hit the floor.

A voice comes from the corner. “What are we going to do with it now?”

Ronan turns and, with a humorless grin, says, “Good to see you again, Leah.”   
  



	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They get out of the car and line up in front of the front door as they had months ago on their first visit. As she had then, Gansey leans forward to press the doorbell. When Blue answers, a wide and somewhat inappropriate smile spreads across Gansey’s face. “Hey Blue,” she says. “We’re gonna need you for something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for discussion of suicide

An hour later, Gansey and Ronan sit side by side on Gansey’s bed, watching the sky outside the wall of windows growing light. After a long silence, Gansey says, “I can’t believe you lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie.”

Gansey rubs her eyes. “Okay, I didn’t record every single thing you said, so I can’t prove it, but god, that was one hell of an omission. I thought – we all thought – you tried to kill yourself. We thought you might try it again.”

“Gansey.”

“What, you couldn’t have broken one lousy promise to your mom to explain to us what had happened?”

“It was a pretty big promise. It was a pretty big secret. And it wasn’t so long after – I couldn’t have, okay? I couldn’t.”

Silence stretches between them again until Gansey says softly, “I’m glad you weren’t actually quite that sad.” When Ronan snorts at this, she says, “What?”

“What’s what you’re taking from all of this?” She says. Gansey just keeps looking at her. She takes a deep breath. “You see what you want to see.”

“What’s that supposed to mean.”

Ronan looks at Gansey, long and hard, and Gansey doesn’t look away. “I dream these things, man. They come out of my head and they try to kill me. That’s all they ever do. It’s the only thing they want. I’m not a fucking shrink but I doubt that bodes well for my psyche.”

Gansey considers this and, with her staunch and foolish optimism, says, “Yeah. Still.”

Ronan doesn’t push the point. “We should go get Parrish.”

Gansey starts. “What for?”

“We’re gonna need the full crew to bury that thing.”

“Oh,” Gansey says. “Yeah, I guess. Blue, too.”

Ronan grits her teeth.  _ Be better,  _ she tells herself. “Yeah. Blue, too. Maybe not just yet, though. Eve doesn’t get to sleep in very often.”

They pass the time quietly passing a beer between them, Gansey for once not commenting on Ronan’s alcohol intake, probably aware that on this particular morning, they’re both in bad need of it. Against all odds, they both fall asleep briefly a little after the sun is fully up, Gansey’s head on Ronan’s shoulder. Waking like that, Ronan thinks with a spark of hope that she does her best immediately to extinguish that the two of them might be healed.

Around ten they take the Pig out to St. Agnes and bang on Eve’s door until she answers, still in her pajamas, hair in messy ponytail. Having agreed that a visual is the best explanation in this circumstance, they tell her as little as possible until the three of them are standing in Ronan’s bedroom in front of the dead monster. Eve’s comments are restricted essentially to the phrase, “Dear God.”

Leah shows up at some point, shuffling up beside Ronan. “What are you going to do about the other one.”

All three turn to her.

“What other one?” Ronan asks.

“The one that got out before we left the room.”

Ronan had noticed the smashed window, but she’d assumed he damage had been caused by the Night Horror that they’d killed. It wasn’t like the creatures were especially careful or graceful.

“There were two.”

Ronan feels a chill of fear. The implications of another Night Horror being free in the world are simple enough. She’s never safe, not even when she’s awake. She sets her jaw. “Let’s just focus on getting rid of the body, okay?”

“Okay,” Gansey says. So that’s what they do.

Instead of trying to drag it across the main room and down the stairs, the three of them lift it and shove it out the already broken window while Leah watches anxiously. Their three heads stick out of the empty window frame to watch it fall with a crash against the gravel below. Ronan drives the BMW around to the back where they load it, with much grunting and shoving and swearing, into the trunk, which they close as far as possible and secure with bungee cords.

Ronan gets into the driver’s seat with Gansey beside her and Eve in the back. Leah has vanished again. Gansey turns to her. “Fox Way?”

She nods and they take off. Really, Ronan thinks, having just escaped with her life from a vicious dream creature which was now stuffed into her not-quite-closed trunk, she should have better – or at least other – things to think about than her jealousy, and yet she feels it rising from the pit of her stomach as they approach the psychics’ house. Still, she does her best to ignore it as they get out of the car and line up in front of the front door as they had months ago on their first visit. As she had then, Gansey leans forward to press the doorbell. When Blue answers, a wide and somewhat inappropriate smile spreads across Gansey’s face. “Hey Blue,” she says. “We’re gonna need you for something.”

Fifteen minutes and one somewhat scattered conversation with Maura later, Blue is buckled into the backseat next to Eve. She and Gansey are trying to explain the situation to him as best they can without showing him the monster, and Ronan is staying well out of the conversation, her eyes for once in her life focused on the road ahead of her.

“So where are we going?” Blue eventually asks.

“Yeah,” Eve says, turning to the front of the car. “Where  _ are  _ we going? You never said.”

Ronan and Gansey exchange a glance. They’d discussed this in the morning while waiting to get Eve, and Ronan had forced the argument to a resolution without anything that could strictly speaking be called agreement from Gansey. “I still think it’s a bad idea,” she says.

“What’s a bad idea?” Blue asks.

Ronan flicks her eyes up to the rearview mirror to look at him for a brief moment before saying, “I’m going home.”

“You’re an idiot,” Eve says flatly.

At the same time, Blue says, “I thought you weren’t allowed.”

“She’s  _ not  _ allowed,” Gansey chimes in.

“It’s my monster,” Ronan says. “And it’s my house, and it’s my ass that’s going to get in trouble if we get caught. We’re going.”

Silence descends in the car, and the Gansey says, “Okay.”

As they leave the town behind and begin down the too familiar road home, Ronan wonders what she should feel. Fear, maybe, at the prospect of breaking the rule laid down by her mother’s will. Maybe excitement to be going home at last. But mostly she just feels the tight knot of her chest slowly unwinding. It’s not a burst of joy but a simple unravelling of all the darkness in her gut. This is how she’s supposed to feel. This is what it’s like to be okay. The only thing that makes it strange and intense is the fact that she hasn’t felt like this since her mother died.

Through the mountains they go, and it’s almost painful for Ronan to hear Blue in the backseat exclaiming at the beauty of it. Of course it’s beautiful. Ronan has known all her life that she lives in the most beautiful place in the world. Gansey is more subdued, stealing the occasional glance at Ronan, reaching out every once in a while to touch her shoulder. Eve is completely silent, and Ronan doesn’t look at her once. When they pull into the driveway, Ronan half expects a flashback, but it doesn’t come. Somehow, the discovery of her mother’s body and everything that followed haven’t poisoned this place for her. There’s too long and rich and lovely a history between herself and the Barns for it even to become complicated in her heart and her head. She steps out of the car and all she feels is relief. All the same, relief can be a violent thing, and it is right now, wave after wave of it crashing down on her. This is what it’s like to be able to breathe. This is what it’s like to exist in her own body. This is what it’s like not in any corner of her brain to be wishing she was dead. She doesn’t know how she’s going to be able to leave.

Eve and Blue have already gone back around to the trunk and Gansey only stops briefly to squeeze Ronan’s hand before going to join them, helping to remove the bungee cords and open the trunk to reveal the creature inside. Blue gasps, and Ronan goes around to watch.

He has a hand slapped over his mouth and nose and when Ronan appears, he turns to her in horror. “This – you  _ dreamed  _ this?” He asks.

Ronan nods curtly. “Time for the funeral.”

They drag it out on the tarp that had been lining the trunk.

“You have a shovel?” Eve asks, voice slow after the effort.

Ronan snorts. “It’s a farm. We have more shovels than Gansey’s mother has – what is it she collects?”

“Plates,” Gansey says dismally.

“Come, there’ll be some in the shed.”

Together they head across the field to the nearest building, a small green hut with a white door. On their way, Blue trips over something. Eve grabs him by the elbow so he doesn’t fall, but stops mid-movement, before she can reach for his hand.

“Ronan,” she says. The name long and lovely in her mouth. Ronan turns. “There’s a cow lying down in the grass.”

Ronan, who had been several paces ahead of them, returns. There, lying in grass so high that it was invisible unless you were standing just next to it, is a brown cow, belly moving slowly up and down with the pattern of sleep.

“It’s alive,” Blue says, which seems pretty obvious to Ronan.

“How?” Eve asks. It’s a fair question. No one has lived here in months and months.

Ronan rests her hand on its side. “Non mortem, somni sororis.”

“What’s that mean?” Blue asks.

Gansey translates more readily than Ronan had expected. “Not death, but her sister, sleep.”

“Strange,” Eve says.

Ronan agrees, but she feels instinctively that this is a bigger puzzle than they’ll be able to solves standing around a mysteriously sleeping cow for a few minutes. “Come on,” she says. “I wanna bury that thing.” She heads again toward the storage shed, but this time only Gansey is following her. Blue remains by the sleeping cow and and Eve is wandering off toward the nearest proper barn. Ronan half thinks of shouting at her to leave it alone, but she thinks better of it.

Gansey helps her haul open the door of the shed and takes to of the shovels that Ronan hands out. “I remember I loved this place so much,” Gansey says, looking around.

About to close the doors, Ronan stands a moment in silence. “Yeah,” she says. She doesn’t feel like talking, doesn’t even feel like swearing, so she hopes her voice is as merciless as her heart just now when she says, “So did I.”

Gansey looks sheepish but also a little annoyed, and Ronan pushes past her back toward where they’d left the Night Horror. “Blue, Parrish, let’s go,” she shouts across the field. She knows how to make her voice carry here.

The four of them gather around the creature, each with a shovel in hand.

“Geez,” Blue says. “I feel like I should say a few words or something.”

“Don’t,” Ronan says shortly, and starts digging.

The rest join in and together they make a pit nearly six feet deep, standing inside it by the end, all of them sweaty and exhausted. The operation takes much longer than Ronan had expected.

“Jesus,” Gansey says as they clamber back out. “I’m glad I didn’t wear a skirt.”

They’re almost too tired to drag the tarp over to the pit, but they manage it, letting it topple in without ceremony and wearily dumping the dirt back over it. When they’re finished, Gansey announces a dire need for a glass of water and they head toward the house.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Lena and Angie for proofing!


End file.
